My Stories

A long blade of grass… Thin, yet with a sturdy tuft at its tip. The children would push it into the holes in the ground and pull it out again. Sometimes the grass would snag on something and not come back.

“Stand back, it’s coming!”

All the children would rush about, waving their blades of grass, then step aside to watch in curiosity. The child holding the stalk would pull with all his might, and a pitch-black scorpion would spring out. Its tail arched high, frozen in shock. Soon they would search under stones for the yellow-tailed ones. What followed was sheer cruelty. The children would pit the scorpions against each other, and by their very nature they would fight to the death. One would lie motionless, but the victor, too, would not live long—soon succumbing to venomous wounds.

When this grim game ended, they would drive their cattle toward the stream, nine or ten kilometers from the village. The air rang with cicadas, so loud that in the shaded, narrowing paths of the forest no one could hear a voice. The journey, begun in the morning, would last until they reached the water.

The cattle would drink deeply, then lie in the shade and chew their cud for hours. For the children, those hours were filled with joy. The stream was famous for its deep pools, especially the one called “Kazan Büğet.” Words could not describe it. Its name came from its shape, like a great cauldron—broadening as it sank deeper. They said it had no bottom. They said mermaids lived there, seizing anyone who dared dive too far, never to return.

The elders forbade the children from swimming there. It was too dangerous. But the children paid little heed. Their greatest thrill was to run and leap from the waterfall into the pool. Those few seconds in the air became an addiction, so they would jump again and again for hours. Weary from play, they would rush home, eat, and then gather once more beneath the great mulberry tree in the village square.

Almost every evening the young men gathered in front of the coffeehouse, telling bawdy stories. What fascinated the children were always the tales of the pool. Especially the stories of Kazan Büğet… They were allowed to take the cattle there only once every two weeks. And even then, swimming was forbidden. They told of a boy who had vanished there, taken by the depths. And so, the story begins.

One evening, under the shade of the mulberry, Mehmet Abi suddenly declared that he would dive into Kazan Büğet and find its bottom. A silence fell. The cries of cicadas pressed into our ears. Everyone stared at Mehmet Abi. He looked determined. Never before had anyone dared such a thing. Soon the talk returned to laughter and indecency, but for us time had stopped. Could Kazan Büğet truly have a bottom?

That night I fell asleep thinking of it, dreaming of the pool and the mermaids.

The next day, it was all we children spoke of. What if the mermaids catch him? What if he dies? I loved Mehmet Abi. He was different. Kind to us. Could he really attempt it? All day we waited for evening. When we gathered beneath the mulberry, I searched his face. He showed no fear. How could it be? When the chatter quieted, I dared to ask:

“Will you really dive into Kazan Büğet to find its bottom?”

Mehmet Abi suddenly turned his head and looked at me.

“Yes. I will,” he said.

“But what if you die?”

He laughed. “Why should I die?”

“But no one has ever tried.”

“Then I will be the first. No one else has dared.”

“But they say children have died there.”

He was silent for a while, gazing at the branches of the mulberry. “Villagers love to invent stories,” he said.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of course I’m afraid. Whoever says otherwise is lying.”

He did not smile. For the first time, I knew he was afraid.

In the following days, it was all we talked about. Would Mehmet Abi really do it? The days passed. When the village work was done, the young men would go to Kazan Büğet to rest from their toil. This time, Mehmet Abi would fulfill his word.

A week later, they decided to go. We children could not sleep from excitement. On the morning they set out, we drove our cattle in the same direction. The roar of the pool filled my ears—ferocious, mysterious. We played games to pass the time. We fought scorpions. At noon we led the cattle to the stream, and they settled in the shade to chew their cud. We ran straight to the pool. Mehmet Abi was there. He pointed to the place: a ledge beside the waterfall, nine or ten meters high. I ran to look. It was terrifying. My head spun. I leaned against the plane tree and watched. Some friends warned it might be dangerous, but Mehmet Abi’s eyes were fixed. His decision was made.

He climbed slowly toward the ledge. I walked beside him. “Maybe you shouldn’t…” I whispered, but he gave no reply.

Mehmet Abi reached the ledge. The crowd fell silent. One child shouted:

“He’s jumping!”

Everyone held their breath. He gazed into the void. The world seemed to stop. The roar of the waterfall mingled with the cicadas’ cries. Even here, in the gorge, the heat of Çukurova pressed down. Then he leapt. Like a bird he soared. He hit the water like a cannonball. The pool frothed, swelled, thousands of bubbles rising. Then—silence.

I looked at my watch and began to count the seconds. Thirty. Forty. The children murmured. His friends looked calm, but unease began to show. A minute and a half passed. The children were crying. Panic spread. His friends grew restless, but no one dared to dive. What could they do if they did? Two minutes had passed. Hope was fading. I stared at the still water, desperate for a sign. The ripples and broken light deceived me again and again. Then I thought I saw a glimmer. I strained to see. Something was rising from the depths. A mermaid?

“I see him!” I shouted.

Everyone turned to the water. The children stopped crying. Mehmet Abi surfaced, limp. His friends leapt in and dragged him out. He lay motionless, his right fist clenched tight. But his heart beat. He breathed. Slowly he opened his eyes, lifted his closed hand, and spread his fingers. Mud spilled into the pool.

“Kazan Büğet has a bottom…” whispered a child.

Yalçın Kır

We were only about eleven or twelve years old. Summer days and stars, two longings intertwined. One seemed like the harbinger of the other. On those hot days, while lying on the mattress we spread on my grandfather’s roof and watching the stars in the sky, we could so easily understand why they called this galaxy the Milky Way. If no one had thought of it before, surely we would have given it that name with our childish minds. As if the herdsman of the sky was feeding his cows with stars. We invented shapes from the stars and tried to push our imagination to its limits.

Billions of stars scattered all around… The years into which I squeezed the most beautiful memories of my childhood. Every day had its own joy, its night, its morning. All night long we watched the sky, I asked my youngest uncle millions of questions, made up absurd dreams. Listening to scary stories was my greatest entertainment. Yet because of the same stories I was afraid to go alone to the toilet outside. Sometimes I would sit by my grandfather’s knee and drift away in tales of old times.

Whether it was because there was no electricity or because of years of habit I don’t remember, the crackling of the pine torch my grandfather had lit by the fireplace would accompany these conversations. One of the stories I remember from those days, and my favorite, was the story of a bandit named Karabıyık. This man, once an officer in the army, had deserted because of some family issues and taken to the mountains, becoming a nightmare for the local rich. My grandfather, with the pleasure of being listened to, would tell his stories so beautifully…

Was Karabıyık an ordinary bandit, or truly a friend of the poor and downtrodden? I still do not know to this day. I even hesitate to research, in order to preserve the memory as my grandfather told it. Later on, I want to write down the other stories I heard about this bandit. Even today, my grandfather’s village is for me the most concrete form of love.

Early in the morning, the village children would gather to take their cows out to pasture. In front, the cows; behind, the children. Ahead, the cows never satisfied with grass and never seeming to be; behind, the children never satisfied with play and never seeming to be… Which was hungrier, no one could tell… Sometimes I joined this caravan with my uncle, sometimes alone.

Where to go was decided the night before. Families did not pressure the children about where to take the cows. Everywhere we went, we had our own special games. For example, there were four different streams we could go to. In these streams we would fish and swim. At noon the cows would retreat into the shade, chew their cud, and rest for two or three hours. Those hours were the most beautiful for us children.

In the beautiful and deep pools we invented all kinds of games. Each pool had its own game. Whether there was a place to dive from, its depth, its clarity, even its temperature—many factors determined what games we chose. In the pastures too we had other games: stick games, metal rod games, chasing each other on tree branches, “kazık” in rainy weather. We even secretly made domino pieces and played domino.

It was secret because such games had a general name: Gambling. We didn’t play for money, but there was always some small price to losing—like being the one to control the cows. Sometimes we had such games that I witnessed what kinds of cruelty children could inflict on animals in the name of play. We entered their habitats and invented senseless games.

For example, we would kill every snake we saw. (This was peculiar to children. Adults would not harm creatures that posed no danger and lived outside human spaces.) With our slingshots we shot every bird we could. With a plant we called “tailed herb” we would pull scorpions out of their holes, make them fight to the death, then hang the winner by its tail from a branch and compete to hit it with our slingshots. At the time these were tremendous entertainments for us. Now I realize what a massacre it was.

At any place or time, without blinking an eye and without calculating the consequences, we would rush into dangerous things. Wandering on the edge of cliffs, diving headfirst into bottomless waters, playing with snakes that could kill us with a single bite, organizing scorpion fights, even playing chase among tree branches… The children created an extraordinary energy among themselves.

Evening return time was sad for everyone. Yet even then our fun did not end. After the cows were tied up, everyone ate, rested a little, and then went out again. Hide and seek, “warm stone,” the incomprehensible attraction of the half-erotic chatter of young men in front of Kerim’s coffeehouse…

The magic in those conversations, whose meaning we could not yet grasp, a tremendous mystery… I was eleven years old and I did not yet know why those talks pleased me. A desire to learn… It was as if the young men had signed a secret brotherhood pact among themselves and founded a club. They would not answer any questions. In fact, they teased us with the pride of knowing those mysterious details.

Even so, with a small distraction we could easily escape the spell of that mysterious language of the young men, get caught up in a game of chase or hide-and-seek, and easily turn our backs on those half-erotic talks. Except for our mother, no woman was indispensable. Even though I was a small child, I somehow knew this recklessness would one day come to an end. One evening, one morning, one day… I didn’t know which.

Then one evening we decided for the next day to go to a pool I loved very much. That was good news indeed. It is still one of my favorite places. Its water clear as glass, its grass abundant. The cows would have their fill of grass, and we our fill of games and fish. We woke early in the morning and set off. My uncle coming with us made me even happier. When with him, I had more fun.

On the way games and stories followed one another, children laughed almost to the point of vomiting, and the younger ones, not to be left out of the fun, followed the older children’s directions to push the cows onto the road or off the road to graze at the side. Everyone was happy—even those burdened with the cows.

As noon approached, the pace quickened. Not wanting to waste even a minute, the caravan longed to reach the pool. Only this time there was a strange detail on the route. About twenty meters above the pool, parallel to the stream, a bulldozer had opened a road. We were surprised at first, but such things were normal there. They made the villagers themselves cut down the surrounding forests, providing uninsured, unprotected, nearly free labor.

And it wasn’t private companies but the state itself that had it done. So we thought the road must be for logging further up, and we didn’t think much about it. In fact, we were glad. It meant the villagers would earn a few pennies, and the rest of the world and nature didn’t concern us much.

My uncle was two or three years older than me. There wasn’t much difference. So our reasoning ability wasn’t very different either. By noon we reached the pool. The cows immediately lay down in the shade to rest. They seemed to enjoy their cud. We jumped straight into the water.

The game had already begun when one child shouted, “Last one in is it!” With all my strength I pulled off my shirt and dived headfirst into the pool. This was my favorite way of diving here. Its depth was perfect. I dived without worrying, without feeling the need to make any move underwater. There was zero chance of hitting the bottom. But something I didn’t expect happened…

I felt something hit my head. A strange taste, as if from my nose, filled my throat. My eyes were closed. To understand, I opened them. I saw nothing. Everything was red. I surfaced. My uncle and the other children’s eyes were suddenly fixed on my head. On the surface of the pool, a layer of blood had formed. My uncle grabbed my head to see what had happened.

Then I understood I had struck the bottom. The first thing that came to mind was the road twenty meters above. How had I not calculated this? The bulldozer must have pushed rocks into the stream. One of those rocks must have rolled into our deep pool.

More than the fracture in my head, what upset me was that the game had ended before it began. I didn’t realize how serious it was, nor did my uncle or the other children. The game would likely continue—after I was sent home. With Ibrahim, a year younger than me, I set off home. On the way I kept feeling dizzy, probably from blood loss. If I fainted, it would take him at least two hours to get help. But I didn’t faint and managed to reach home.

The game was over for me. In fact, that whole summer was over for me. For this fracture, whose scar I still carry today, they put in seven stitches. The doctor said I had escaped a great danger, that the fracture was very deep.

Now when I think about it, that incident deeply affected my life. I no longer think of anything I experience as independent of its surroundings. Whatever I do, I tend to include even the most unlikely possibilities. Sometimes this makes me overly cautious.

I even connect it to our strictness in giving our children certain punishments that may seem harsh, seeing how effective it is. My head was broken, and my body, instead of pitying me and healing early, did not heal sooner than it should have. The day the swelling and bandage came off, school had already begun and we had already left the village. Life had given me a long time to think about my mistake…

So that whole time I could not herd cows or play with the other children. I had to stay home. The only thing I enjoyed about it was the chance to spend more time with my grandfather. Sometimes he put me on the horse and we went to the forest for firewood. I would sit and watch as he loaded the logs onto either side of the horse with a method I still don’t understand.

He did it so neatly and beautifully I cannot describe it. But the horse had to stand still. Sometimes the horse moved, and the neatly stacked logs fell. My grandfather would curse with all his roughness and start again from scratch. It was as if the horse understood his anger and stayed still.

Once the logs were loaded, he would put me on top of the pile, take the reins in hand, and lead the horse home. On the way we would have delightful conversations. He would tell me more stories and answer my questions. Sometimes, too, he would sing the folk songs and long airs I later learned were from Çekiç Ali, singing just like him.

Even today, when I listen to Çekiç Ali, I wander in dreams and think of my grandfather. I never felt as if he tried to teach me anything. He just did things. Only if I asked, he answered. Otherwise he kept silent. He didn’t talk much, but I never hesitated to ask, because he always answered every question.

The children kept going every day and returning every evening. Every day they passed by our house. From my grandfather’s wooden porch I impatiently waited for their return. It felt as if they were coming from unknown lands. Even if I couldn’t join in the evening games, I joined their talk.

As they told what they had done, the places they spoke of felt to me as if I had never known them, as if they were foreign. In the flow of time, what remained in memory were not everything said and felt, but only fragments. Out of the millions of words I exchanged with the children, with my grandfather, only these remain…